The Power of Deception Just Won

What really just happened? Why, at the root cause level, did Trump win? The article casts an analytical eye at the most astounding political event of our time and concludes that the root cause is low truth literacy. The average vote cannot tell fact from fiction. This explains why conventional solutions, like fact-checking and pointing out the truth after a falsehood has entered a person’s mind, have little effect. Three sample solutions for resolving the root cause are briefly presented, including Politician Truth Ratings, which takes fact-checking to the next level.

November 11, 2016 ~ Jack Harich

People are in shock. Suddenly the very survival of democracy is at stake. If candidates like Donald Trump can win in the country that gave the world its first version of modern democracy, then we can have little rational hope that the general welfare of the people and the rights of man will prevail, as enshrined in the United States and French constitutions of 1788 and 1789.

What just really happened? And what can we do about it? We cannot un-elect Trump. But we can prevent more Trumps. I’d like to explain how this is possible, based on analysis of the political system. As a starting point let’s begin with what Paul Krugman had to say in The New York Times three days after the election: (Italics added)

“So what do we do now? By ‘we’ I mean all those left, center and even right who saw Donald Trump as the worst man ever to run for president and assumed that a strong majority of our fellow citizens would agree. ...

“First of all, remember that elections determine who gets the power, not who offers the truth. The Trump campaign was unprecedented in its dishonesty; the fact that the lies didn’t exact a political price, that they even resonated with a large bloc of voters, doesn’t make them any less false. No, our inner cities aren’t war zones with record crime. No, we aren’t the highest-taxed nation in the world. No, climate change isn’t a hoax promoted by the Chinese.

“So if you’re tempted to concede that the alt-right’s vision of the world might have some truth to it, don’t. Lies are lies, no matter how much power backs them up.

“And once we’re talking about intellectual honesty, everyone needs to face up to the unpleasant reality that a Trump administration will do immense damage to America and the world.”

Krugman displays his own intellectual honesty when he closes the article with these thoughts:

“Maybe the historic channels of reform — speech and writing that changes minds, political activism that eventually changes who has power — are no longer effective. Maybe America isn’t special, it’s just another republic that had its day, but is in the process of devolving into a corrupt nation ruled by strongmen.

“But I’m not ready to accept that this is inevitable — because accepting it as inevitable would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The road back to what America should be is going to be longer and harder than any of us expected, and we might not make it. But we have to try.”

Krugman has got it right. We cannot lapse into wringing our hands and denouncing the result. There must be something we can constructively do to right this terrible wrong and prevent it from ever happening again. But what?

The road back begins with “unprecedented in its dishonesty” and “the lies didn’t exact a political price.” It was not Trump who won. It was deception that won. The winner could have been any similar candidate who based his appeal on dishonesty and lies. That is was not Trump but deception that won tells us where to begin the analysis that will lead to the road back.

The power of deception just won. Krugman knows it. So does nearly everyone that could listen to the words of Trump in an objective fact based manner. Some are doing more than listening. They are analyzing Trump’s truthfulness.

For example The Washington Post, as shown below, found that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump followed strikingly different campaign strategies. Clinton is the Champion of the Truth, while Trump is the Master of Deception. The truth data shows that Clinton’s statements follow a normal distribution. Their truth clusters slightly to the right of the middle with smaller tails below and above. Most of her statements had truth ratings of 2 or 3. In sharp contrast, Trump’s statements follow an abnormal distribution. 65% received 4 Pinocchios, the highest possible rating for falsehood. In plain English, 65% of Trump’s statements were blatant lies. Trump’s core strategy is deception, while Clinton’s is the truth about what’s best for the common good.

The reason “historic channels of reform... are no longer effective” is that past reform efforts did nothing to resolve the root cause of why political deception works. It works so well for Trump that “the lies didn’t exact a political price.” But if future reform aims at resolving the root cause then it will work, because all problems arise from their root causes.

That short but powerful phrase, all problems arise from their root causes, contains the seeds of how we can begin a successful journey on the road back. Our journey will not be easy, because it’s a road that’s never been traveled before. The current mechanisms of democracy contain nothing to prevent lies from electing Trumps. Following Krugman, I too feel that “The road back to what America should be is going to be longer and harder than any of us expected, and we might not make it. But we have to try.” For doing that I would recommend the most powerful tool known for solving difficult problems of any kind: root cause analysis.

Root cause analysis is the process of finding and resolving the root causes of a problem. A root cause is the deepest cause in a causal chain that can be resolved. In this short article I can only briefly explain how root cause analysis can be used to prevent more Trumps. Root cause analysis works by starting with a problem’s symptoms. You then keep asking WHY until you arrive at the root cause(s).

Krugman wrote that “a Trump administration will do immense damage to America and the world.” In other words, voters are voting against their own best interests. That behavior describes the symptoms of the problem.
Now we ask our first WHY question. WHY are voters voting against their own best interests? As Krugman and many other have noted, it’s because lies work. In other words, voters frequently believe lies are the truth. That is the cause of the symptoms.

If that’s the cause, what is the cure? Conventional wisdom says the cure is more of the truth. Lies can be corrected by somehow spreading more of the truth, which will cause voters to realize they’ve been lied to, wise up, and not believe those lies anymore. Solutions for spreading more of the truth include fact-checking, articles pointing out the truth, slogans like “we go high when they go low,” etc. The analysis is diagrammed below.

However, we know these solutions are not working. Trump won anyhow. The fact checkers in particular were out in force. But that didn’t matter. Dara Lind, writing for Vox, describes the system’s behavior eleven days before the election:

“It takes a certain kind of stubbornness to lie about things that are easy to verify.
“Donald Trump does it all the time. ...

“He doesn’t just stretch the truth in the way most politicians do: selectively citing facts that make them look good, deliberately omitting ones that make them look bad, overstating or understating the probable impact of the campaign promises they make.

“No, he just says things that aren’t true. And he knows it. Sometimes it’s something big — routinely, on the campaign trail, he tells voters that he's going to lower everyone's taxes while Hillary Clinton will raise them. ...

“Even though fact-checkers deploy their forces on Trump regularly, he never apologizes or retracts. Calling out his lies doesn’t make his supporters any less loyal to him.

“His nonchalant dishonesty is horrifying. The fact that much of the American public simply doesn’t appear to care about his dishonesty — or that they don’t consider it a deal breaker for a potential president of the United States to tell several lies even on his most honest days — is more so.”

The pattern is clear. Lies work for Trump. Fact-checking does nothing to stop him. Later, after a long review of Trump’s lies, Lind reaches an insightful conclusion:

“The lies keep coming. And we have no idea what to do about it. And nothing we’ve tried so far has worked.”

So what’s the matter with popular solutions like fact-checking? Root cause analysis tells us that if a set of solutions has been tried and fails repeatedly, then the reason must be because the solutions do nothing to resolve the root cause of the problem. There can be no other possible reason. As Sherlock Holmes so eloquently noted, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

It is impossible for voters frequently believe lies are the truth to be the root cause, because if it was, popular solutions would be working. We must therefore investigate deeper and ask our second WHY question. WHY do voters frequently believe lies are the truth?

That’s a difficult question to answer. I worked on it for seven years as part of research into root cause analysis of the global environmental sustainability problem. A portion of this analysis led to what I feel is a reasonable answer, as diagrammed below.

Social systems are no different from physical systems. Both are ruled by their fundamental forces. Physical system behavior is determined by forces like gravity and momentum. Social system behavior is determined by the fundamental forces that make up the foundation of that system.

Here we are concerned with a tiny piece of the political system, The Voting Against Their Own Best Interests Problem. Those promoting popular solutions like fact-checking believe the root cause force is voters frequently believe lies are the truth. But this belief is flawed because that’s not the root cause of problem symptoms. It is the intermediate cause.

Asking “WHY do voters frequently believe lies are the truth?” reveals the fundamental layer of the problem, below the dashed line. This layer is hard to see without root cause analysis. The root cause is that general ability to detect political deception (truth literacy) is low. We know this must be so because if truth literacy was high, lies would not work and Trump would not be the next President of the United States.

Truth literacy is the ability to tell truth from deception. Fact-checking does nothing to raise truth literacy. Instead, it attempts to correct lies after they have infected a person’s mind. That’s like trying to cure a person’s cancer or diabetes after it has reached a chronic stage. The cure will work on a small percentage of cases if the disease is not advanced. But it fails completely on advanced cases. As Lind reported, “Even though fact-checkers deploy their forces on Trump regularly, he never apologizes or retracts. Calling out his lies doesn’t make his supporters any less loyal to him.” Trump’s supporters are so infected with his ideological web of lies that they are immune to more of the truth solutions, like fact-checking and pointing out the truth articles. Furthermore, fact checks do not reach nearly the number of people that lies do. Fact checks are a drop in an ocean of lies.

If the root cause is low truth literacy, then the high leverage point is obvious. We must raise truth literacy from low to high. In a democracy, truth literacy is just as important as reading literacy because if people cannot “read” the truth of what politicians say then they are blind to the power of deception, and deception will win most of the time.

Truth literacy can be raised with solution elements like Freedom from Falsehood, the Truth Test, Politician Truth Ratings, etc. Once truth literacy becomes widespread, a population is inoculated against the manipulative power of deception and false ideologies like Trumpism, McCarthyism, racism, and fascism cannot take hold and spread.

Briefly, Freedom from Falsehood gives every citizen the right to freedom from falsehood from sources they must be able to trust, like politicians. Freedom from falsehood must become a fundamental right of man if democracy is to work as intended. The Truth Test is a simple procedure that allows citizens to tell truth from deception in a matter of seconds, in most of the cases they are likely to encounter. The test can be taught in grade school and be learned and practiced by all.

Politician Truth Ratings would provide an accurate measure of the average truth of what a particular politician says. Like credit ratings or product ratings, Politician Truth Ratings would allow people to more correctly make crucial everyday decisions. The ratings would be created by independent trusted organizations. Politician Truth Ratings are already partially implemented because they depend on fact-checking. But people need a truth rating for politicians, not a truth rating for individual statements. Politician Truth Ratings takes fact-checking to the next level by checking a statistically valid random sample of statements for a politician. The average is the politician’s truth rating.

Imagine how the election would have turned out if average truth literacy was high instead of low. Paul Krugman would have written a very different article. Instead of Thoughts for the Horrified he might have written Thoughts on Hillary’s First One Hundred Days. And Dara Lind, instead of penning a piece on Donald Trump Lies. All the Time, might have turned her eye to one on We Are Stronger Together. All the Time.

As I see it, the next step in the long evolution of modern democracy begins with a single question: What is the root cause of why The Power of Deception Just Won?

The analysis was performed over a seven year period from 2003 to 2010. The results are summarized in the Summary of Analysis Results, the top of which is shown below:

Click on the table for the full table and a high level discussion of analysis results.

The Universal Causal Chain

This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: the black arrows. This leads to using superficial solutions to push on low leverage points to resolve intermediate causes.

Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, where the complete causal chain runs to root causes. It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like renewable energy and strong regulations should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes.

In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden red arrow. Further analysis finds the blue arrow.Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create the green arrow which solves the problem. For more see Causal Chain in the glossary.

This is no different from what the ancient Romans did. It’s a strategy of divide and conquer. Subproblems like these are several orders of magnitude easier to solve because you are no longer trying (in vain) to solve them simultaneously without realizing it. This strategy has changed millions of other problems from insolvable to solvable, so it should work here too.

For example, multiplying 222 times 222 in your head is for most of us impossible. But doing it on paper, decomposing the problem into nine cases of 2 times 2 and then adding up the results, changes the problem from insolvable to solvable.

Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.

Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other subproblems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, effort to solve the other three subproblems is largely wasted effort.

The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.

Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.

In the sustainability problem, large for-profit corporations are not cooperating smoothly with people. Instead, too many corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their strenuous opposition to solving the environmental sustainability problem.

The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. The goal of the corporate life form is maximization of profits, while the goal of the human life form is optimization of quality of life, for those living and their descendents. These two goals cannot be both achieved in the same system. One side will win and the other side will lose. Guess which side is losing?

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause follows easily. If the root cause is corporations have the wrong goal, then the high leverage point is to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

The world’s solution model for solving important problems like sustainability, recurring wars, recurring recessions, excessive economic inequality, and institutional poverty has drifted so far it’s unable to solve the problem.

The root cause appears to be low quality of governmental political decisions. Various steps in the decision making process are not working properly, resulting in inability to proactively solve many difficult problems.

This indicates low decision making process maturity. The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise the maturity of the political decision making process.

In the environmental proper coupling subproblem the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. Environmental impact from economic system growth has exceeded the capacity of the environment to recycle that impact.

This subproblem is what the world sees as the problem to solve. The analysis shows that to be a false assumption, however. The change resistance subproblem must be solved first.

The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property (like the air we breath). This means that presently there is no way to manage common property efficiently enough to do it sustainably.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to allow new types of social agents (such as new types of corporations) to appear, in order to radically lower transaction costs.

Solutions

There must be a reason popular solutions are not working.

Given the principle that all problems arise from their root causes, the reason popular solutions are not working (after over 40 years of millions of people trying) is popular solutions do not resolve root causes.

This is Thwink.org’s most fundamental insight.

Summary of Solution Elements

Using the results of the analysis as input, 12 solutions elements were developed. Each resolves a specific root cause and thus solves one of the four subproblems, as shown below:

Click on the table for a high level discussion of the solution elements and to learn how you can hit the bullseye.

The 4 Subproblems

The solutions you are about to see differ radically from popular solutions, because each resolves a specific root cause for a single subproblem. The right subproblems were found earlier in the analysis step, which decomposed the one big Gordian Knot of a problem into The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.

Everything changes with a root cause resolution approach. You are no longer firing away at a target you can’t see. Once the analysis builds a model of the problem and finds the root causes and their high leverage points, solutions are developed to push on the leverage points.

Because each solution is aimed at resolving a specific known root cause, you can't miss. You hit the bullseye every time. It's like shooting at a target ten feet away. The bullseye is the root cause. That's why Root Cause Analysis is so fantastically powerful.

The high leverage point for overcoming change resistance is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We have to somehow make people truth literate so they can’t be fooled so easily by deceptive politicians.

This will not be easy. Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first, so it takes nine solution elements to solve this subproblem. The first is the key to it all.

B. How to Achieve Life Form Proper Coupling

In this subproblem the analysis found that two social life forms, large for-profit corporations and people, have conflicting goals. The high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. Since the one causing the problem right now is Corporatis profitis, this means we have to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

Corporations were never designed in a comprehensive manner to serve the people. They evolved. What we have today can be called Corporation 1.0. It serves itself. What we need instead is Corporation 2.0. This life form is designed to serve people rather than itself. Its new role will be that of a trusted servant whose goal is providing the goods and services needed to optimize quality of life for people in a sustainable manner.

What’s drifted too far is the decision making model that governments use to decide what to do. It’s incapable of solving the sustainability problem.

The high leverage point is to greatly improve the maturity of the political decision making process. Like Corporation 1.0, the process was never designed. It evolved. It’s thus not quite what we want.

The solution works like this: Imagine what it would be like if politicians were rated on the quality of their decisions. They would start competing to see who could improve quality of life and the common good the most. That would lead to the most pleasant Race to the Top the world has ever seen.

Presently the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. The high leverage point is allow new types of social agents to appear to radically reduce the cost of managing the sustainability problem.

This can be done with non-profit stewardship corporations. Each steward would have the goal of sustainably managing some portion of the sustainability problem. Like the way corporations charge prices for their goods and services, stewards would charge fees for ecosystem service use. The income goes to solving the problem.

Corporations gave us the Industrial Revolution. That revolution is incomplete until stewards give us the Sustainability Revolution.

This analyzes the world’s standard political system and explains why it’s operating for the benefit of special interests instead of the common good. Several sample solutions are presented to help get you thwinking.

Note how generic most of the tools/concepts are. They apply to far more than the sustainability problem. Thus the glossary is really The Problem Solver's Guide to Difficult Social System Problems, using the sustainability problem as a running example.